Easy Meat

by John Harvey

  Miller had shaken his head. “Know what this means, don’t you? This DNA business, it’s like a fingerprint, right? Once you’re in their books, they’re gonna come chasin’ after you every chance they get.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Naylor said, “the only times we hang onto the samples is if you’re actually convicted, or officially cautioned for a recordable offense. Otherwise, they’re destroyed.”

  Miller threw back his head and laughed. “Believe that, you believe the moon’s made of fuckin’ green cheese!”

  “Don’t tell me,” Divine said, disappointed, “that it’s not?”

  The first thing the search team did at Miller’s house was to bag and label carefully the boots in the shed. There was a car ready and waiting to whisk them off for analysis. The house itself, though, proved a disappointment. True, there were back issues of The Order and a few other bits of right-wing paraphernalia, but nothing to get Special Branch worked up into a sweat. In a tatty address book, they found a few phone numbers that would ring bells with Trevor Ulman and the Football Intelligence Unit, but again, there were no major surprises. The collection of top-shelf porn devoted to women with abnormally large breasts was well-thumbed, but compared to some of the stuff that was routinely confiscated this was very small beer indeed. And they turned up no likely weapons; nothing resembling a baseball bat.

  Once you got beyond the main downstairs rooms, the house Gerry Hovenden shared with his father was indeed a shitheap of the first degree. Hovenden senior was a classic hoarder and the only prerequisite for being an object saved seemed to be that whatever it was, it was covered in dirt. There was a layer of grease along the banister rail, on all the shelves and surfaces, over everything they touched. Engine parts, old clothes, yellowing newspapers, fuse wire, cycle blocks, quarter heels for sticking on shoes, bottles of oil gone rancid, copies of paperback Westerns with the pages bent back, rusty tools. And, in the midst of all of this, the glove—the one that Gerry had hurled there, back among the recesses of that upstairs back room, thrown there among the cobwebs and the musty boxes, the rat droppings and the silver fish—the leather motor cycle glove which matched the one found on the Embankment near Bill Aston’s body. Its identical opposite. Its partner. Its twin.

  Paul Matthews’s mother sat at her kitchen table, picking crumbs from around a piece of seed cake and lifting them absentmindedly to her mouth. “Be gentle with him, won’t you? He’s never meant any harm.”

  Matthews was upstairs in a bedroom that had scarcely changed in the last fifteen years. Scouting certificates hung on the wall beside a color photograph of the Forest team from 1981 and a map of South Wales; framed on the window ledge was a picture of a smiling Paul, newborn lamb in his arms, in the lane alongside his aunt’s house.

  “How was the rest of the visit?” Khan asked. “Are you feeling any better?”

  Tears at the edges of his eyes, Matthews turned away.

  “I’m glad you phoned,” Khan said gently. “I think it was the right thing.” A pause, then: “You’ll feel better, after you’ve talked. Got it off your chest.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes, it’s all right. You can.”

  “I can’t tell you everything. I don’t know … Oh, God!”

  “It’s all right.” Khan put his hand on the base of Matthews’s neck and let it rest there. “Just tell me what you can.”

  After some moments, Matthews reached into his pocket for a tissue and Khan moved his hand, sat back, and waited. He thought Matthews might break down again and cry, but instead he simply sat there on the side of his bed, telling his story, the one he had told so many times inside his head out walking the cliffs, watching the waves break back upon the shore.

  He described how this particular group of youths, the older ones, half a dozen of them, had got up from the television room earlier on the night that Nicky died, and swaggered towards the door. How the biggest of them, at least as big as Matthews himself, if not bigger, had sauntered back over to Paul and fixed him with a grin and told him to stay where he was, carry on watching whatever he was watching—unless he wanted to go up and watch them.

  And then they had gone up to Nicky’s room, all six of them, and locked the door from the inside. And he hadn’t known what to do. He’d been frightened, scared of them, the way they would swagger about the place and smoke and swear and sometimes there were these drugs they got from somewhere, and they would mock him, call him names, make threats, and he knew it was too late to stand up to them, far too late, and when the screams from Nicky’s room were so loud they could be heard, even downstairs, all he had done was go over to the TV and turn up the sound.

  “You didn’t tell anyone?” Khan said after a moment.

  “No, not at first. Not then.”

  “But later?”

  Matthews’s eyes were closed. “I told Mr. Jardine.”

  Something akin to pleasure lurched deep in Khan’s throat. “You told him what you’ve just told me?”

  Matthews nodded.

  “Paul?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “And what did Mr. Jardine say?”

  Matthews opened his eyes. “He said there was no need to mention it to anyone else, especially at the inquiry. He said it would only muddy the waters. He said anyway it wasn’t relevant at all.”

  “What about the other staff member on duty? Elizabeth Peck? You didn’t say anything to her?”

  Matthews pressed the tips of his fingers against his temples so hard that when he finally withdrew them, there were pale ovals clear against the skin. “She wasn’t there. Not all evening. Not until I phoned her and told her she’d best come in.”

  “She was ill, sick, what?”

  Matthews shook his head. “She was working at another job.”

  Khan got to his feet and went across to the window. On the roof opposite a workman was sitting, a brightly colored scarf tied round his head, drinking from a Thermos and reading a newspaper.

  “These youths,” he said, uncapping his pen. “What are their names?” And Matthews told him, each name like a nail.

  Resnick and Millington had decided to take Hovenden first. The glove they had found in his house? The one matching that discovered at the murder scene? Yes, Hovenden had agreed, it was his, but so what? He’d chucked it up months ago, before Christmas probably, after he lost the other on a ride up through the Peak District. Late November, that would have been. Snow on the tops, he remembered that. Whatever they’d found down by the Trent, no connection, nothing to do with him.

  Resnick didn’t tell him that forensic were even now checking out the body fibers from inside the glove found near Aston’s body, microscopic particles of skin, matching their DNA against Hovenden’s own. That could wait till confirmation came through; enough for now to leave him rattled.

  “All right, Gerry,” he said, “play it that way if you like. We’ll go and have a chat with your pal, Frank Miller, see if he can’t throw a little more light on things.”

  Hovenden nervously laughed. “Frank’d not as much as never cock his leg on one of you lot if you were on fire.”

  “Okay, Gerry,” Resnick said pleasantly, getting to his feet. “Have it your way. For now.”

  “Cocky bastard!” Millington said, once they were out in the corridor.

  “Bravado,” Resnick said. “Nothing more. Behind it all, he’s one unhappy boy.”

  “Thinks his mate Frankie’s about to dump him in it, you reckon?” Outside the second interview room, Resnick grinned. “Let’s see if he isn’t right.”

  Frank Miller claimed only vague memories of a Saturday night’s drinking. Yeh, yeh, this pub and that; a pint with this bloke here, a few more with these pals there. Dinner on the way home, curry maybe, fish and chips. Come to think of it, wasn’t that the night he never got back at all? Fetched up at his brother-in-law’s place in the Meadows, sharing the floor with the pair of Rottweilers his sister was hoping to breed from. Long as they didn’t do it,
you know, while he was kipping there. Why didn’t Resnick send someone round, find out for himself?

  Resnick less than well pleased, another alibi depending upon close family more likely to commit any amount of perjury before seeing their nearest and dearest end up in the nick.

  “Meantime,” Millington said, “why don’t you try telling us about these?” And with something approaching a flourish, he produced the Caterpillar boots.

  “What about ’em?”

  “Well, do you recognize them, for a start?”

  Miller shrugged. “Hundreds of pairs like that, must be. Thousands.”

  “Are you saying they’re not yours?”

  “What I’m saying,” a cocky strut to Miller’s voice, “is that I don’t know. They could be mine and then again, they could not.”

  “Maybe you’d like to try one on?” Millington suggested.

  “What is this? Fuckin’ Cinderella? ’Cause if it is, we got the Ugly Sisters well cast, I can tell you that.”

  “These boots were found,” Resnick said, “in your garden shed. This morning.”

  “Really? Amazing, i’n’it, searched for them bastards everywhere.”

  “Lost,” Millington mused, “and then were found.”

  Resnick sneaked him a quick sideways look. For a man whose only confessed religious experience seemed to have been Petula Clark singing one of the songs from Jesus Christ Superstar, biblical references were unexpected to say the least.

  But Millington was not through. “Interesting what was found on them, too. That style of boot, you see. All those deep cracks and crevices in the sole, you’d be amazed what gets stuck in them.” He paused, Miller watching him carefully now. “Or maybe not.”

  Miller slouched back in his chair, head round for a moment towards his brief, one eyebrow raised. “So tell me,” he said.

  Millington flipped the cover of his notebook back. “Mud, for a start …”

  “Yeh? Surprise, fuckin’ surprise,” said Miller, but his heart wasn’t in it.

  “Earth,” Millington went on, “consistent with that found on the section of the Embankment where Inspector Aston was murdered. Not only that, we found blood, small traces of blood across the tongue of the left boot, the same blood type as Aston.”

  Blood was now in short supply in Miller’s face.

  “Something else we found,” Resnick said, leaning in, “a cassette tape with a lot of music by a band called Saxon, a favorite of yours I believe? And that’s not all—it seems whoever’s tape it was had used it before, recording made at a BNP rally, autumn of last year. Shouldn’t be impossible to check if you were there.”

  Miller sat there for several moments, arms resting on his knees, staring at the ground. Then he looked up and pursed his mouth into a perfect O. “Got a cigarette?” he asked. “I need a fag.”

  His solicitor tapped him on the arm. “You’re under no obligation to talk about this now, not without discussing it with me first.”

  “What you can do,” Miller said politely, politely for Miller, “fuck right off. And poke me in the arm again and I’ll break every finger in your fuckin’ hand. Understood? I know my rights better’n you.” It was understood.

  A knock on the door fetched Resnick out of the room and the expression on Naylor’s face told him the news faster than words.

  “Fuck!” Resnick said, not a word he often used, or lightly. It seemed certain that the surplus blood found on Aston’s body had come neither from Hovenden nor Miller.

  He was on his way back into the interview room when Khan appeared at the end of the corridor, smiling: not all news was bad. After listening he sent Kevin Naylor in to sit with Millington—he wanted to confront Jardine himself.

  Forty-five

  The suit was different, double-breasted with wide lapels, dark with a narrow pinstripe running through, but the amount of dandruff that had fallen from Jardine’s graying hair was the same. The veins etched into his nose stood out more prominently, the corners of his eyes were watery, clouded yellow.

  He began by offering Resnick his hand and when it was refused, sat back behind his desk and folded his arms across his chest.

  “DC Khan and myself have just come from the police station,” Resnick said, each word spoken with especial care, “where one of your staff, Paul Matthews, has made a statement about the events leading up to the death of Nicky Snape on these premises.”

  Jardine flinched and covered his mouth with the opened fingers of one hand.

  Resnick nodded towards Khan, who took an envelope containing several sheets of paper from his inside pocket. “I would like you to read that statement now.”

  Jardine hesitated before reaching out and taking the statement from Khan’s hand; he still avoided looking either officer in the eye.

  “Read it,” Resnick said, “all of it, carefully, before making any response.”

  Jardine’s eyes stalled at the end of the first paragraph and then started again. At the end of the second paragraph he glanced sideways towards the wall, the photographs where his career was smeared. By the time he had reached the end and had pushed the sheets away across his desk there were tears in his eyes but not enough.

  “What Matthews says is basically correct?”

  Jardine nodded: yes.

  “He told you those youths had been in Nicky Snape’s room the evening he died?”

  “Yes.”

  “That in his opinion they had been bullying him, at the very least?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that in his belief that bullying had been of a sexual nature?”

  “There is no proof …”

  “But that was what he said?”

  “Yes.”

  “The staff member in charge?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you did nothing.”

  Jardine glanced from Khan to Resnick and shook his head.

  “You told Matthews to do nothing, say nothing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you mind telling me why that was?”

  After a pause, Jardine said: “It would only disturb the smooth running of the home. I didn’t see what good would be served.”

  “And why was that?”

  Jardine looked at him directly for the first time. “Nicky Snape was already dead.”

  On his feet, Resnick retrieved the statement from the desk. “Copies of this statement have been sent to the Director of Social Services, to Phyllis Parmenter, the member of the Social Services Inspectorate who chaired the original inquiry, and to the Crown Prosecution Service. Detective Constable Khan will question the youths named in the report as soon as you have arranged for a parent or legal representative to be present. Is that understood?”

  Jardine nodded, head once more bowed, and Resnick, after a quick glance towards Khan, left the pair of them in the room. Now that it was done, he couldn’t wait to shed himself of the sad, corrupt smell of that room, that man, that institution.

  One night on the thin mattress of the police cell had been enough to bring Frank Miller to his senses. Talking his way out of the blood on his boots, the voices on the tape, he knew would be difficult—and why? To save the hides of a pair of queers—he was sure they were, no matter how much they denied it—who just weren’t worth saving. Commit perjury for the likes of them! Bugger that for a game of soldiers!

  So Miller began banging on the inside of his cell door a little after seven and by nine he was sitting back in the inquiry room with Millington and Naylor and a tape machine. The story he told was this: his brother-in-law, Ian Orston, had had words with some of the Irish who used this pub on London Road and had asked Frank and a few other mates to come and help sort them out. Teach them to pay some respect. Frank had tipped the wink to Gerry Hovenden, who, in turn, had enlisted Shane. But Shane had never showed, not then. And it was Ian who had brought along the baseball bat, a Christmas present to his kids.

  They’d done the business in the pub.

  Frank couldn’t remembe
r whose idea it had been to walk on down to the river, maybe look in at the Trent Bridge Inn, but that’s what they’d done. After closing, they had all headed back across the bridge, pretty pissed by now and noisy, pushing one another around for the fun of it, because there wasn’t anyone else to push. Ian and himself had wandered off in front, aiming for lan’s place in the Meadows and going to take the path across the playing fields, back of the Memorial Gardens. It was somewhere around then, on the other side of the Trent, that the others must’ve met up with Shane, who was already in an argument with this bloke. The one who turned out to be the copper. Poor bastard!

  Anyway, there was so much shouting Frank hadn’t been able to hear everything, except he remembered that Shane had accused the bloke of being queer—which was a bit rich, Frank thought, coming from him—and of trying to grab hold of Shane’s balls in the Gents. Next thing you knew they were all over him, shouting “Fucking poof!” and the like, kicking the shit out of him.

  Frank and Ian had stood back on the path, watching. Frank fancying a bit of it himself, he didn’t mind admitting, but the way they were swarming round the bloke there was sod-all room.

  And then Shane had broken away and came at a run for lan’s bat; gone back in there and smashed the bloke about the face like he wanted to take his head clean off. In the end, Gerry had pulled him away. Tried to give Ian back his baseball bat, but Ian said no way.

  “I went over and looked at him,” Frank said. “Total bloody mess.” He shrugged. “That must’ve been when I got his blood on me boots.”

  “And at no time while this was going on,” Millington asked, “did you raise a fist in anger or deliver a blow?”

  “Me?” Frank Miller said. “Not one. You got my solemn word.” And he grinned.

  Hovenden denied all of it: every word. The results of the tests on the fibers from the glove had still not returned. “Give him time to chew on it a while.”

  “This Ian Orston,” Naylor called from over by the computer, “he’s got some previous. D’you want me to pull him in, see if his account tallies?”